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Image, Message & Audience: Building Your Brand in the Marketplace

Writers and philosophers have often pointed out that human behavior doesn’t contain a great deal of consistency. Yet one area of life that should maintain a thorough consistency is your company’s branding. Whether it’s visual in nature or related to the message you’re sending, your branding campaign should provide a constant, unchanging quality. This will establish a trusted connection with your audience and convey that your organization is dependable and its work will be steadfast. Successful, established brands have not only sold good products, but they’ve sold compelling images of themselves and a strong branding campaign should achieve the same goal.

How it Looks: The Visuals

In marketing, appearance counts. Something appealing and stylish can win a person’s attention and be an initial way of hooking someone to receive your company’s message. Anything that changes appearance or style sends a confusing message and will turn customers away from your company.

Colors, logo, and design are the essential branding visuals and will create the first impression with the consumer. Since these things have to fit the identity of your company and its products and services, each one has to have a specific meaning behind it. You can think of your logo design as a boiled-down visual symbol of your company; it’s far more than just an attractive graphic. It’s also crucial that your logo and all other visuals appear consistently in all your marketing materials as far as sizing, scale, and recognizability.

What it Says: The Content

The visuals can grab an audience’s attention, but those won’t win them over. Your content is what’s going to convince them that you’re the best choice for meeting their demands. Even though you may face several competitors in your field, your company inevitably has something unique about it that will distinguish it from everyone else. Find this and convey it within your content; it’s how you will stand out and connect with your intended audience. Let people know what you do, why you do it, and why you’re the best at it.

Who it Reaches: The Audience

In the sport of archery, a few different tactics all combine to allow a bull’s eye to be achieved. Having good aim is only one part of this; you also need to ability to gauge how far the arrow must travel and keep a steady grip. Branding’s relationship with an audience is similar to archery in that many factors have to be kept in mind: the message itself, who it’s reaching, and how it can best connect with that audience. Whatever the message might be, it must be clear, consistent, and convincing. Once you’re able to establish these traits with your branding campaign, you have the best chance of success.

Hitting the target: Consistency Will Pay Off

The goal of building your brand is to create trust between your organization and your audience. Trust won’t occur if your marketing work is inconsistent, leaving the customer unconvinced of the company’s integrity and cohesiveness: “If the marketing message isn’t solid, what might that say about the quality of a company’s work?” Branding may seem at first to be simplistic—logo design, color scheme, and tag lines don’t appear incredibly complicated, but they carry a lot of weight and communicate a great deal about a company’s professionalism and dependability.

Crafting an effective message means knowing your audience and their demands, and your brand is the means for delivering that message. Hitting the target depends on a thoughtful, well-orchestrated campaign, and following the guidelines here will ensure that the response to your brand will be a positive one.